About

Biography

Jennifer Tarry-Smith is a Melbourne-Naarm based artist working in the mediums of printmaking and painting. She produces abstract works that are meditative explorations of line and negative space. Tarry-Smith is drawn to the intricacies and nuances that emerge as pattern evolves and changes to suit its environment. Since graduating with a Bachelor of Drawing and Printmaking from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018, Tarry-Smith has exhibited in over 25 national and international exhibitions. She recently completed the Printer Training Program at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After returning to Australia, she has founded Salt Press, a collaborative printmaking workshop specialising in lithography. Tarry-Smith is also a printmaking lecturer and technician at RMIT University.

If you’re interested in checking out my collaborative lithography business, head to saltpress.com.au

Artist Statement

Across my practice, the wavering line functions as both image and meditative act; a way of thinking through rhythm, repetition, and time. Drawing, painting, and printmaking are used to trace larger systems of movement and pattern, including topographies, bodies of water, and elemental forces that shift between observation and memory. My current exhibition, The Sun Goes to Sleep in the Sea, follows the movement of light across water as it glitters, dissolves, and returns in changed forms. Through slow, layered processes, I trace fleeting transformations: the sparkle of sunlight on open water, the quiet depth of a rockpool, the soft drift of silver light at dusk. These works gesture toward abstraction as a way of holding perception and memory; how light both reveals and releases form, reframing the sea not as a fixed landscape but as an ever-shifting surface where the world is continuously reorganised through shimmer, rhythm, and quiet unfolding.

Click to Download - Jennifer Tarry-Smith Artist CV

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